Forrester research indicates that private cloud has entered into the formal IT portfolio by becoming a core part of data center strategy. I have been writing about the sea change underway in private cloud. This sea change means that automating the provisioning of virtual machines and their infrastructure is inadequate in a world where your users expect continuous delivery.

Application developers want to accelerate application stack design and deployment. Your customers expect to consume applications and their supporting infrastructures on-demand and take delivery within minutes.

Doubt this fact? I consistently hear from senior executives about the growth of shadow IT within their organizations simply because the data center cannot meet delivery expectations.

At CiscoLive Milan today, the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite was introduced. I can hear your response now…..What another cloud management platform? So I will respond: no way!

Many of today’s solutions are simple toolkits that require IT administrators to customize and maintain integrations between tools, processes, applications and teams. IT needs to become software and infrastructure engineers. End users have expectations of simplicity and out-of-box operation and these tools simply frustrate meeting end users expectations.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is an engineered software solution not a platform. It delivers a hybrid-ready private cloud software solution that contains out-of-box installation and content. There are out-of-box utensils designed specifically to accelerate the design and deployment of your existing and cloud-first applications – across private and hybrid environments. Learn more by watching this video.

You’ve often heard me say that Cisco partners need to continue to evolve their businesses to stay competitive and be successful. As the trend for delivering technology as a service continues, now more than ever partners must evolve their business to support the demand for new consumption models, like cloud and managed services. And in order to support our partner’s evolution, Cisco is evolving our Partner Program with the availability of the new Master Cloud Builder Specialization.

As I announced at Partner Summit back in April, this new specialization brings together the data center architecture specialization, Cloud Builder designation and adds competencies to deliver solutions like Vblock, Flexpod, and VXI. Think of the new Master Cloud Builder specialization as the customer’s “one-stop shop” for the highest level of competencies for data center and cloud.

No matter which analyst report you read, the market opportunity for both private and public cloud infrastructure will be billions of dollars over the next several years. The Master Cloud Builder Specialization allows partners to differentiate even further to help capture a greater share of the rapidly growing cloud market.

Partners have a choice in the role they want to play in cloud (Builder, Provider, Reseller) and the level of investment they want to make. Cisco is committed to continuing to invest in the success of our partners, to help you optimize your business value and see the greatest return on your investment in Cisco.

Along with the availability of the new master specialization, Cisco is launching the Cisco Cloud Partner Marketplace. Created based on your feedback, this tool gives partners a place to market and promote their Cisco cloud-based solutions and services.

I encourage you to learn more about the new Master Cloud Builder Specialization and the Cisco Cloud Partner Marketplace and I look forward to our continued journey together in this ever-changing marketplace.

Find out what some of our partners had to say about the Master Cloud Builder Specialization.

The worldwide cloud services market will likely surpass US$109 billion in 2012. What’s more, the cloud services market is a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace, a recent Gartner report says. No shock there!

So what are you doing to take advantage of this shift? Cisco is here to help you create demand for your services and market them, too.

Last year, Cisco introduced the Cloud Partner Program. Today, the program has 133 approved Cloud Builders and 46 approved Cloud Providers. Collectively, the 46 Cloud Providers are offering more than 50 Cisco Powered Cloud Services to the market.

Today we’re taking the next step along that path and introducing a Master Cloud Builder Specialization that rewards channel partners who have proven capabilities to build and deploy cloud-ready integrated infrastructures using Cisco solutions and our partner cloud offerings across storage, virtualization, cloud management, and virtual desktop.

Essentially, Cisco is elevating the Cloud Builder role from a designation to a full-blown Master Cloud specialization. (After September 19, 2012, Cisco will no longer accept new enrollments or applications for the Cloud Builder or Cloud Infrastructure designations.)

The new Master Cloud Specialization comes with differentiated branding and incremental financial incentives, too. With this new specialization partners can create competitive differentiation and facilitate a new generation of IT and cloud services. We talked to Susheel Chitre who is the Director of Cloud and OEM Business Development at Cisco, and he told us some more ways that Cisco is helping partners help themselves and customers.

“We help partners differentiate services and offer support to help you build and sell unique solutions to customers so they can select the right cloud model and solution for their networks,” he said.

We’re not only helping you differentiate and build new services, we’re giving you new tools to help you market your solutions directly from Cisco’s web site. How’s that? Keep reading. Read More »

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.